I never use it. The extra damage isn’t worth the potential error imo and since air legs got nerfed, you have even less time to try and confirm into it. I remember cr. LP, st. LP xx EX Kikoken lead to the same ender for like 30 less damage too, so I would opt to go for that when I was still thinking about it.

I don’t know about you , but I’m excited to learn this new trigger and all the combos that go with it. I might swtich back and forth for online play. I do favor the current v-trigger she has and the expanded combo potential, but this ggives me another reason to learn Chun-Li. And I’m excited.

Considering her poor damage, her vt1 is essential to me atm. Maybe Kikosho will come with some additional stuff, like higher damage ?
Her vt2 seems to be 3 bars, so it has to be something powerful.
Her vt1 is so useful though, with multi hit normals nullifying armor moves, longer kikokens, extended combos and even a small damage boost on all moves. It’s so hard to imagine playing her without these options now…

I’m curious to see what Boxer’s vt2 will be. There’s no way people will choose any vt2 over his vt1 atm lol

Unless it does something like cancel from every button or is the most gdlk anti-air or fireball punish (even still, that’s iffy or questionable) I don’t really see it as an attractive option over what she can do with VT1 from a competitive standpoint… at least not right now. Hopefully there’s more to it, but Kikosho has remained largely unchanged over the years… just a big ki ball in front of her. The only new thing I can imagine it doing is pulling the opponent in like Zangief’s V-Trigger does.

I didn’t use st.mp xx fireball strings in season 1 so I really haven’t bothered in season 2.

However, now that I am looking into incorporating fireball VT cancels into my gameplay, cr.lp, st.mp xx fireball xx VT seems like a pretty good way to cancel into VT on block. Execution doesn’t seem too hard but a problem is that you need to be really close yet already have some back charge stored up so it’s only a real option in a few situations, like delayed cr.lp after an anti-air/on opponent’s wakeup.

I go for B+HK -> cr. HP xx HK Legs to save meter and it’s a bit more consistent.
Juggle-abilty is limited when you start with a heavy attack in v-trigger because you can really pretty much only do another heavy and certain specials afterward. Only CC juggles circumvent this rule.

Yeah, st. MK is one of my favorite buttons. It’s a low crush that’s good in combination with her other mid range pokes, can still convert off of VTC and recently I’ve been trying to apply it for counterhits as well (in v-trigger you don’t need counterhit to combo into cr. LP, cr. MK xx SBK). I think @Dime mentioned before that it has the startup that is right in between the threshold where someone who’s delay tech grabbing will be able to block and tech, so blowing up tech grabs is an application of it that is a bit faster than F+HK and pushes back a bit farther on block…

Don’t use st.mk as a pressure tool. I see why you’re using it but the better option is to delay cr.lk (or delay whatever +oB button you choose, but cr.lk is the best in VT). It’s a bit hard to get used to delaying buttons but it covers way more things – not only beats throw, but also blocks reversal, hits if they’re not blocking low, leads into pressure on block, blocks wakeup button. It’s also a really important skill to learn in general since Chun’s shimmy is not the best and delayed buttons naturally give you a lot of flexibility such as fishing for corner b+HP CC.

st.MK is usable but very average and you really don’t want to be using average pokes as Chun. I think it’s best against Rashid and Laura because their cr.mks low profile everything else you’d use at that range.

As for MOV’s matches, the wakeup EX legs (throw OS?) probably caught everyone’s eye already but my favorite thing is the sequence starting at 20:16. In just a few seconds he pulled out so many tricks to open up Mago’s defense.

So I don’t know if any of you use this, and it’s old tech to be sure, but it’s still super powerful…

Life bar hitconfirms.

Ridiculously easy.

When I’m doing my hitconfirm training in training mode I never used this because I figured it was “to pro” for my scrub ass… and I didn’t like sf5 anyways. But now that I’ve got zeku I’m loving the game so… I’m actually willing to do work. But the problem is that I have a hard time confirming some of zekus light strings. So I decided to use the lifebar… it makes shit SOOOO much easier. I went from not really being able to do some of his light confirms even in training mode, to being able to do them practically 100%.

So I decided… well lest test this shit out with my other favourite character, Chun. I practiced cr.mk xx ex legs… totally doable. Then I practiced cr.mk xx super and I don’t have the timing for it, but with practice it will be totally doable as well. Then I moved into the coup de grace… St.HP xx super confirm and of course St.HP xx v trigger confirm. Well… it’s pretty easy folks. The super confirm might not be worth it since it only does like 398 damage… but the v trigger confirm is absolutely wonderful because it basically means that you are going to get guaranteed damage every round if you can confirm it. So this makes chun much more powerful.

Combine the cr.mk xx ex legs confirm and the St.HP xx v trigger confirm and chun might be able to go up in tiers… because I promise you guys that with practice if my scrub ass can do it in less than 5 minutes of practice, you guys with much better reactions will be able to as well. And that’s a HELLUVA lot better than just randomly trying to activate off of a slide or non confirmed St.HP.

What were you confirming with before? I play without sound sometimes, and find my confirms to be noticeably worse, so I’ll tentatively say that audio is the most important thing to confirm off of (I say tentatively because it’s quite hard to compare when you never exactly play SF without visuals). For visual cues though, yeah HP confirming is really useful.

cr.mp xx VT is also something I’m rapidly phasing out of my gameplay. It was actually not ever that good, st.HP xx VT confirms were always better, and are still the best option overall, but now that we have cr.mk xx HK/EX legs xx VT as a low confirm into VT that puts you closer to the opponent, it’s even worse to just fish with cr.mp. cr.mp xx VT is still good when you react to a fireball or something and low profile it, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not really a good use of your resources to just pop VT and be 0 on block.* There’s also fireball xx VT, which is seemingly far and away the best option on block if you just want to mindlessly pop into VT although that’s legitimately really hard due to range constraints so I haven’t managed to successfully incorporate it into my gameplay yet ;(

*cr.mk xx HK legs xx VT is also 0 on block but it’s actually pretty easy to confirm cr.mk as you said and against characters without 3frames it sets up a massively superior situation on block compared to cr.mp xx VT because it puts you so close to your opponent.

It’s funny how many things st. HK can tag for a CC in neutral. I use it mostly for certain V-skills because they are easy to bait/look for and react to, but I didn’t think until recently to try it on Dhalsim’s pokes in combination of what I usually go for with B+HP. Before I was only using it to anti-air his V-skill when he’s in range, but didn’t know it was also fast enough to catch his standing pokes after blocking his st. MP or st. MK (both are -4 on block). B+HP is the standard for catching him double dipping with those buttons, but decent Sims will mix in a jab or something to throw you off, plus it won’t catch a st. HP if he does that. Chun’s st. HK will catch his standing pokes as long as you’re in range (including his st. HP because he doesn’t dip low until later in the move… this is what I love about it the most) and if he whiffs a jab, it will catch the recovery of the jab. CC’ing with this gives you a more damaging way in (dash up cr. MK xx Legs/EX Legs from almost any range or dash up st. MP, cr. MK xx SBK if you’re close enough).

Obviously this whiffs over him doing crouching stuff, which is why I said use it in combination with the standard B+HP to beat his double dipping poke tactics and make him think twice about it (then you can just dash in if he’s being hesitant).

-I do hate fighting Sim in this game a lot and played against more Sim than I can stomach at the last tournament (would’ve probably won my match if I had just thought to V-reversal his divekick and avoid the mixup), but I’m glad the post-tournament labwork allowed me to find this as I think will help me quite a bit in neutral the future. Another thing I found that I wasn’t looking for before is to simply whiff punish his out of range pokes… with a cr. LP.

You’re probably thinking why not just go for cr. HK and get the knockdown so you can get in? Well, I’ve been fully aware of that counter for over a year and while it’s good for reacting to something like his st. HP when you’re looking for it, the variance in Sim’s poking game and timing plus cr. HK being nerfed to 8 frames in a game with roughly 6-7 frames of input delay, makes this kind of hard to react with consistently. Sims will toy with you or simply won’t do that move out of range if they know you’re looking for it. I even know about cr. MK to tag the recovery of most of his pokes… still a bit too slow to do consistently when you’re also looking for other stuff imo.

Cr. LP will easily tag the recovery of ALL his pokes and I think the 30 damage taps add up quickly with the way neutral is played in this match. It recovers super fast and I think it will be a good way to force him out of his element and have him change it up to doing things you can more easily deal with.

What were you confirming with before? I play without sound sometimes, and find my confirms to be noticeably worse, so I’ll tentatively say that audio is the most important thing to confirm off of (I say tentatively because it’s quite hard to compare when you never exactly play SF without visuals). For visual cues though, yeah HP confirming is really useful.

cr.mp xx VT is also something I’m rapidly phasing out of my gameplay. It was actually not ever that good, st.HP xx VT confirms were always better, and are still the best option overall, but now that we have cr.mk xx HK/EX legs xx VT as a low confirm into VT that puts you closer to the opponent, it’s even worse to just fish with cr.mp. cr.mp xx VT is still good when you react to a fireball or something and low profile it, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not really a good use of your resources to just pop VT and be 0 on block.* There’s also fireball xx VT, which is seemingly far and away the best option on block if you just want to mindlessly pop into VT although that’s legitimately really hard due to range constraints so I haven’t managed to successfully incorporate it into my gameplay yet ;(

*cr.mk xx HK legs xx VT is also 0 on block but it’s actually pretty easy to confirm cr.mk as you said and against characters without 3frames it sets up a massively superior situation on block compared to cr.mp xx VT because it puts you so close to your opponent.

I hitconfirm visually. I tried to do it by sound but for some reason I react slow to certain audio cues.

I’ve literally put hundreds of hours into hitconfirming with very little success at getting better at it past my raw ability. The only confirms that took me awhile to learn that I can now do easily are st.mp style confirms.
I can even do things like uriens CH st.mp>Cr.hp confirm… but not easily and only if I’m really looking for it. I can do jab medium CH confirms pretty easily though, if I’ve practiced them for whatever character I’m using.

So… I had a thought recently about stagger pressure and why chuns isn’t that great and how we as players can make it better. It’s all old news, but whatever. For me, I would say that good stagger pressure is based on 4 attributes for a character:

Walkspeed (the faster the character the better their stagger pressure in general)

Frame data on block, having moves that have good plus frames is a must

Knockback on moves (less knockback equals better stagger pressure)

Range of your moves and ability to combo/confirm into each other

Chun has the walkspeed. She also has good enough frames. Her knockback however is bad, very bad so that’s one reason why it’s not great. Her ability to use range as well isn’t good as far confirmation purposes.

But chun also has tools that break this mold. Namely her cr.mk, if you can hitconfirm it… would be ridiculous. It causes the opponent to not want to press buttons because her cr.mk has great priority and hitbox, and it also causes the opponent to not want to walk backwards. So basically with the threat of this move on hitconfirm, Chun becomes a complete,y different character and her stagger pressure and walk up throw game would be great… so the lifebar confirm could be extremely good for her in that respect. Also, since ex legs is safe on block, if chun hits an airborn opponent and misconfirms that way, she’s still relatively safe.

Using zeku, he doesn’t have good walkspeed, and his confirms can lack in range, but I’ve found that… tbh, I don’t always need to confirm with him. Simply hitting my opponent with a medium or something is good enough.
So I put people under enormous amounts of stagger pressure with him. With chun, I don’t know if it would be worth it, but outside of st.mp stagger pressure which leaves much to be desired because of the st.mp lack of range, Chun still gets some walking jab pressure which is probably good enough is the chun player can make good reads and add in some st.mp and BHP here and there. That’s what I do with zeku. Most of my stagger pressure isn’t designed to confirm, it’s designed to make the opponent predictable with their block or buttons and I try and set them up for a CC with zeku which does like 300 damage meterless. Chun has no such luxury, but she does have a good bhp and fear of that move can more than likely allow chun to use her great walkspeed to get some some nice walk up throws from the range where she would be at after 2 blocked cr.lp’s.

For me, I consider my stagger pressure to be effective if I can walk forward half the distance that a jab knocks me back, once in my blockstring. That usually allows me one extra poke and also puts the opponent into a bit more pressure than they might be accustomed to… but I do tend to sometimes get 3-4 microwalks in a zeku string once I’ve trained my opponent not to press buttons. This allows me to put way more presssure on my opponent than what I should be getting.

The key for me is to be as unpredictable as possible. I tend to start my blockstrings with random moves that are plus on block so my opponent doesn’t know where to break out. It’s much easier for an opponent to break out of a string if you always start it with a jab, or 2 jabs, or a medium…becaus they know what timing I will use.

Another thing I use with zeku is instead of doing microwalks, I will also just do delays or I will purposely use very slow moves to give my opponent more time to hit a button. I mix this up with gaps that are designed to hit 3 frame mashes so my opponent never knows where they can safely poke. Once people start to get don’t this way they usually start to just walk backwards out of my pressure which is where a good low would do wonders… but zeku can’t cancel from his low mediums normally so I have to setup a punish with my v trigger cancel.

So basically first thing I do is lots of 4 and 5 frame gaps. Only really good or really bad players are going to be doing moves fast enough to hit these gaps. Once I’ve trained my opponents with gaps of that size, I look at what they are doing and adjust accordingly. If all they do is block I start throwing them or mixing in microwalks. If they mash or always tech my throws then I do delays with moves that are slower but have more range (chuns fmp would be the perfect move here) then after that I just mixup all my options until I get another read on a defensive tendency at which point my blockstring pressure will start to really harp on beating that tendency.
But in general it’s 4-5 frame gap for starters (chun cr.lp,bhp as an example) then try to set up a CC or a throw, then start to confuse the opponent with varied microwalk and delayed frame trap options.

It’s not perfect by any means but when you get the entire strategy and stop trying to confirm every little thing it becomes very fun because trying to hitconfirm everything makes you predictable because your microwalks have to be more pronounced to get back into a range where a confirm can happen.

This has helped me stay on offense for much longer periods of time and steal lots of turns, with zeku at least. Maybe it can work for chun to… maybe, maybe not.